Thousands of patients die waiting for beds in hospitals – study

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Northerner

Northerner

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Almost 5,500 patients have died over the past three years because they have spent so long on a trolley in an A&E unit waiting for a bed in overcrowded hospitals, a study by leading NHS doctors has found.

Their conclusion that long delays finding spare beds is costing patients’ lives has emerged as Boris Johnson comes under mounting pressure over the fragile state of the NHS.

In all 5,449 people have lost their lives since 2016 as a direct result of waiting anywhere between six hours and 11 hours, according to research seen by the Guardian. It found that those deaths represent the total “estimated attributable mortality” from the delays.

The Patients Association called the findings “deeply shocking and very worrying” and blamed the deaths on underfunding of the NHS.

https://www.theguardian.com/society...ients-die-waiting-for-beds-in-hospitals-study
 
What do those figures represent? People who would die anyway (there are quite a few of those)? Who decides whether those folk would have survived with treatment? I don’t think there’s any dispute that waiting times are terrible in England, but there’s no need to invent “estimated attributable mortality” it’s a nonsense.
 
Yes mikeyB - treat all those numbers with some caution.

Remember the attempt to make political capital out of the idea that the French were better at treating heart disease than the British? It was a surgeon who pointed out to me that if somebody old dies in Britain and there is no point in find out what from, the British convention is to record the cause of death as heart failure. In France, under similar circumstances, the convention is to record the cause of death as old age. Hence more people in Britain die of "heart" problems and so the French are better at treating heart disease.....or so the perverted logic went.
 
My paternal grandma died of 'heart trouble' - dad was 12 -ish so that would be in approx. 1927, but he had no recollection of her being 'sickly' when he was little, neither did his older sister. The second, middle child Gwenda had died aged 12 ish - no idea what was up with her. After I was diagnosed T1 - I always wanted to know what might have caused her to die and Grandma's heart to fail - because though two people of my generation have had T2, my own big sis diagnosed in her 50s, our only cousin (dad's sister's only child) in her mid 60s - there is no apparent family history of T1 or T2.

Pete recalls his Grandma's GP saying to him when he collected her Death certificate that although it might sound an awful thing to say, it had given him a certain sense of satisfaction to write 'Old Age' as the cause on the document, as it had been such a long time since he'd had the opportunity to write that truthfully.
 
The surgeon who told me the story did say that as a very junior doctor he had written "old age" as a cause of death on a certificate but was told to change it to heart failure and had done so ever since!
 
Interestingly, I once certified the death of one of my patients as 'Old Age' after a discussion with, and permission from, the Coroner. She was 107.

I was tempted to certify 'Entropy', which is a more exact reason, as I'm sure Docb will agree.
 
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